Europe Attracts the Wrong Kind of Immigrants

A quote from Richard Posner on The Becker-Posner Blog, 31 July 2005

The assimilation of immigrants by the United States, compared to the inability of the European nations to assimilate them - with potentially catastrophic results for those nations - is not unrelated to the differences between economic regulation in the United States and Europe. Because the U.S. does not have a generous safety net - because it is still a nation in which the risk of economic failure is significant - it tends to attract immigrants who have values conducive to upward economic mobility, including a willingness to conform to the customs and attitudes of their new country.